Please forgive the persistence of posts on civil discourse across differences, but we increasingly see threats to such interchange as touching the core operations of a university. The past posts here and here informed about the Georgetown Dialogue Initiative. This post describes services to faculty that the Center for New Designs and Learning (CNDLS) is offering right now.
The Georgetown Dialogue Initiative is organized about different activities. The first is a set of classes that are designed to involve two instructors who will demonstrate the grappling with different theoretical or practice perspectives on the course content. This will allow students to two adults listen to opposing ideas, grapple with them, point out how they are different, and try to understand the underlying assumptions of the differences.
The second is a set of larger events with two speakers in dialogue about a topic on which they disagree. The first of these will occur on September 23 in Copley, with a Republican and a Democrat ex-governor in dialogue.
The third part of the Dialogue Initiative is work to assist all faculty in transmitting to students the capacity to engage in conversations confronting different viewpoints. The tools CNDLS has built could be adopted without major intervention in the content of a class but may make important differences in the outcome for students.
A first introduction might be a quick visit to a website that is a valuable portal into a whole set of tools — Inquiry and Dialogue Toolkit. An even quicker look can be obtained by reviewing a quick summary.
The toolkit has a variety of suggestions about how an instructor can build an environment inside a classroom to engage in conversations that present alternative and conflicting perspectives on an issue. One goal is to remove the fear of students of being canceled by their classmates because of views they forward. Removing the fear is assisted by acquiring conversational skills.
The essential requirement in learning environments is that the focus is on ideas. To absorb alternative ideas requires curiosity that leads to active listening to the ideas. Thus, it is key to seek a separation of ideas, on one hand, from the persons forwarding the ideas, on the other. In short, ad hominem statements conflate ideas and people and destroy real communication of ideas.
There are many recommendations for trust-building features of the classroom. Instructors are encouraged to use Chatham House Rule, to limit discussion outside of class to the ideas presented by not the identifying the person who offered the idea. Another clever suggestion is to write down the ideas on the classroom board or display, without identifying the person who forwarded the idea.
There are other suggestions that may be difficult for faculty to implement but appear to have great value in setting the right environment. Faculty can admit that they themselves make mistakes in speaking and need to clarify what they meant in a later conversational turn. Humans misspeak. Hence, listeners need to give the other a chance to elaborate and correct miscommunications.
Toward that end, there is the guidance of urging students to inquire about the reasons underlying another’s position on a topic. Knowing why someone believes something often helps resolving what on the surface appear to be irreconcilable differences.
Some of the toolkit offers suggestions that may help an instructor ease students into discussions inherently conflictual. One idea is to start with a set of simple exercises in which differences of opinion are likely to occur. I love the following ideas:
• “Ask [the] group “What makes a good pet?”; when the conversation quickly devolves into a “cats vs. dogs” debate, point this dynamic out to students.”
• “Dedicate a portion of a class session to a “fishbowl” discussion centered on a low-stakes topic, like identifying the best kind of candy. Before starting the discussion, have the “fish”, i.e., the students who will be in the center of the conversation circle and speaking, step out of the room briefly to ponder their ideas. [When they return] Ask the students still in the classroom (the non-fish) to pay attention to the conversation dynamics, not just to the content of what is said.”
The unifying goal of these exercises is to identify conversational features that enhance effective communication of alternative perspectives without breakdown in the interaction.
In addition to these tools, available to all, CNDLS will host a series of workshops open to all faculty, including an MCEF-CNDLS Teaching Forum on Productive Tensions. It will also offer workshops on Teaching Around the Election and other topics as events unfold. Stay tuned for these.
In short, Georgetown faculty have a great new web resource to explore new ways of encouraging open discourse of alternative ideas, building the capacities of students to learn how to navigate discourse among differences. CNDLS deserves our thanks.
Great interesting and important program.